10 Cool Online Twitter Search and Discovery Tools

Whether you are a casual or power user of Twitter, you may find yourself often searching this phenomenally successful social platform to find people or to get the latest happenings on the Internet. Twitter’s own search tool, despite having many advanced search options, simply streams tweets as they come and does not even auto-refresh the results.

If you are looking for more fun and interesting ways to search and discover content on Twitter, then there are many online tools which give real-time results with trending charts, interactive maps and even popularity meters. Here is a list of 10 Cool Twitter Search Tools to enhance your Twitter experience.

1. Twellow

Twellow is a free Twitter People Search directory of public Twitter accounts where you can register for free and get listed. Twellow has more than 50 main categories based on professions, such as Business/Financial services, Arts, Energy, Religion & Spirituality etc. This free Twitter Search engine makes it easy to find and follow people of similar interests. TwelloHood, it’s interactive map based tool lets you find interesting people easily in your neighborhood. Currently TwelloHood is available only in United States, Canada and Australia.

2. TweetGrid

TweetGrid lets you keep a watch on several topics at once and see real time updates. This free Twitter Search Dashboard lets you choose from a variety of grids. You can get updates on different topics, events, hashtags, phrases, people, groups etc. You can also search for tweets in your neighborhood with TweetGrid’s support for geocoding. This automatically refreshing Twitter Search service does not require you to login to your Twitter account unless you want to tweet, reply, receive direct messages or mark as favorite. You can even save your customized grid and go back to it easily by bookmarking it.

3. TweetMeMe

Are you a busy person and don’t have the time and patience to keep a watch on a real-time Twitter stream? TweetMeMe’s tweet popularity rating service will keep you updated with the most popular links on Twitter, without wasting your precious time. This cool Twitter Search tool categorizes all popular links into categories, sub-categories and channels making it easy and quick to find interesting content. The TweetMeMe button, which can be added to blog posts by authors gives an easy way to let the world discover and share interesting stories. TweetMeMe encourages interactivity by letting users comment on featured stories and also re-tweet their favorite comments.

4. Tinker

Are you a movie buff and want to closely follow the latest release of your favorite actor or actress on Twitter? Tinker is an online Twitter search tool which has been designed to follow interesting Events. You can get the latest news on your favorite events by creating an Event Stream in Tinker with chosen keywords. Tinker gives users complete control over Event Streams created by them. Tinker requires free registration with your Twitter account to get started and can also be used to promote events.

5. Topsy

Topsy is different from other Twitter search engines in that it’s results are not tweets, but website links. Similar to a web search engine, Topsy gives users the most relevant and popular links on the web. Only Topsy uses a different method to aggregate these links. It uses the power and popularity of Twitter to give you fresh and updated information from people’s tweets and conversations.  Topsy ranks the results based on the popularity of the link (how many times it was retweeted) as well as the influence of the person who tweeted it first.

6. TipTop

TipTop is a Twitter Conversation search engine which shows what people are talking about by categorizing tweets as ‘Tips’ or ‘piTs’. ‘Tips’ are positive reactions where as ‘piTs’ are negative emotions. While TipTop is not perfect in it’s semantic filtering and you occasionally find positive tweets misplaced in the negative stream and vice versa, it still does a good job. Even though TipTop does not auto-refresh the page despite it’s real-time claims, this unique Twitter search tool is a fun way to know what’s on people’s minds. TipTop does not require Twitter login to view the positive and negative streams.

7. Twubs

Twubs is a real-time Twitter search engine based on Twitter hashtags. Twitter hashtags is a way of tagging tweets for identification to bring them up in Twitter Search results. A Twub is a community built around a #hashtag and features several ways to connect to Twitter users. Any one can join a Twub, tweet the Twub, create Tweetups and Events etc by signing in with their Twitter account. Twubs supports image and video sharing. It gives a real-time auto-refreshing feed of tweets around a particular hashtag along with photos and videos pulled from external sources.

8. BingTweets

BingTweets is a two-in-one search tool showing results from Microsoft’s Bing Search engine and also real-time tweets from Twitter in the same interface. The Twitter trending topics featured on BingTweets is a quick and easy way to keep up with the latest happenings on Twitter. BingTweets lets you share the results obtained with your friends and contacts by tweeting the web page URL.

9. TwitDir

TwitDir is a Twitter people search directory, similar to Twellow. TwitDir lets you search on Twitter for public Twitterers by names, by Twitter usernames, by locations and even by descriptions. TwitDir gives Twitterer lists of Top 100 followed, followers, updaters and favouriters. A search tool with a very basic interface, TwitDir is very quick in giving you the results.

10. Trendmetr

Trendmetr is a fun way to know the popularity of a search term on Twitter in the last one hour. You can add your own meters to track interesting topics. Trendmetr’s colorful dB meters might not be perfect indicators, but are still entertaining.
Enjoy your Twitter Search!